To that end, I recently invited Coray Seifert, Darius Kazemi, Jay Barnson, and Scott Macmillan. Our topics of discussion revolve around the relationship between the IGDA and the indie developer. We cover a lot of grounds in this podcast and touch on some important topics. I hope you enjoy listening to my guests as much as I did.

I am very interested in continuing this series on the IGDA–bringing in more perspective and grappling with some tough questions. If you’re an IGDA member, or an indie developer, or both, and you’d like to appear in a future episode, please let me know. I’ll be putting together groups of three to four people as often as once a month, should there be interest.

To subscribe to this and future podcasts, you can add us on iTunes, or a podcast-specific RSS feed.

And stay tuned later today for the return of the monthly Blogs of the Round Table topics!

[EDIT: If you were confused to hear people who were obviously not Scott, Jay, Darius, or Coray--give it another listen. We had a technical glitch that's now been resolved.]

[EDIT: In the interest of complete transparency, "We had a technical glitch that's now been resolved," actually means, "I'm an idiot who shouldn't be trusted with auto-fill features in web browsers."]

I’d like to thank my guests:

• Kiera Peney is a regular BoRT contributor at Write the Game and a community manager for Isotx.
• Keith Nemitz is the owner of an indie game development studio, Mousechief!, and the designer of an RPG you really ought to have played by now-Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble

The women’s self defense training Keith mentions in the podcast can be found at their site Model Mugging.

Our conversation rambles across the topic, not falling into easily defined chunks, but the topics include adventure games, interactive fiction, the applicability of considering literary themes when examining AAA titles, and our thoughts about the topics of the last two Round Table topics.

Subscribe to the podcast via RSS or iTunes

Here’s a list of links to the indie games and sites referenced throughout the podcast. If I miss any, let me know and I’ll add them!

• Chris Tolworthy’s Enter the Story
• Adam Cadre’s Photopia
• Emily Short’s Galatea
• Aaron Reed’s Blue Lacuna

Thanks again to Deirdra and Travis for being such great guests and spinning my questions into gold!

P.S. The podcast is not actually 4 hours long, as may be reported by iTunes or your media payer, but is actually about 66 mintues. I haven’t figured out how to get the bitrate conversion to register correctly, which explains the discrepancy.

P.P.S. The forthcoming book I mention is Well Played.

For quick reference, the three posts we discuss in this podcast are Living Epic’s Oedipus the RPG, Post-Emo-Existentiell Gaming’s Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? and Show & Tell’s Omelas: A Game. The book I reference at the end of the podcast is The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. One of these days, I’m going sweep cross the ring of salt, dig it up, unseal my copy from the six-ton concrete tomb I buried it in and read it again. Really. Any day now. Honest.

The three indie games referenced in the podcast are The Majesty of Colors (on Konqregate) by Gregory Weir, Execution by Jesse Venbrux, and Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble from Keith Nemitz of Mousechief.

Subscribe to the podcast via RSS or iTunes

February’s BoRT’cast is going to take a slightly different approach, but feel free to make suggestions based on this month’s podcast format. I figure after a few months, we’ll have hit upon a strategy that tickles the fancy of us all.

Today’s podcast features Creative Commons licensed tracks from the album Instrumental Field by recording artist T.c.k.

Please feel free to leave your initial impressions of this week’s ‘cast here in the comments, or send me your thoughts via email, or use them as a springboard to your very own post for this month’s Round Table!

I had another contest embedded in the credits of last week’s podcast and the winner of that contest was Joe [1] from Cult of the Turtle! Congrats Joe, be sure to contact me with your mailing address so I can get your prize to you.

It’s going to be a fun week of expanding upon the discussion started in the podcast so without further ado, let’s begin!

Today’s podcast takes a brief look at four sneaky protagonists–Garrett, Agent 47, Sam Fisher and Altair–in order to explore how the third-person action genre produce radically varying gameplay, depending on the focus of the story.